Viewing Jake Wood-Evans: The Edge of Reality

Dreamlike and ethereal, the East Sussex-based artist Jake Wood-Evans’ newest body of work continues to develop his practice of drawing on the legacy of Old Master paintings to create canvases that veer between abstraction and figuration.

This time, Wood-Evans references a selection of works from the Western classical art canon, including paintings by Joshua Reynolds, John Singer Sargent, George Stubbs and J.W. Waterhouse. But instead of reimagining their subjects, the artists instead uses them as a starting point, stripping back the artwork layer by layer and confronting the viewer with a painting that demands to be looked at further, with new interpretations and meanings to be gleaned. In this way, Wood-Evans compels the viewer to consider the ideas, more than the fixed subject, and challenges the contemporary market for its dismissal of the original historical works.

This is conveyed through the ethereal vignettes and spectral figures that drift across the canvases, seeing subjects that may have been dismissed as sentimental through a new lens that reinforces the original work’s artistic merit and simultaneously presents a work that is fascinating in its own right.